by Brad Warner

Pirooz Kalayeh’s movie about me, Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen, is done and ready for the world. It was shown for the first time on October 5th, 2013 in Amsterdam at the Buddhist Film Festival of Europe. People there dug it, I am told. I couldn’t attend because that day I was hosting a 5-day Zen retreat at Benediktushof.

Now we’re going on the road with it and we are asking, nay begging, you to help us do it! Pirooz has set up a fund raiser for the tour right here on Indie Go Go. This will be how we’ll pay for us to go to the cities where the movie is playing and host the screening as well as do other interesting stuff.

We have three screenings set up right now for which tickets are currently on sale:

Folks like you, the readers of this here blog, are the target audience for this movie. So please come out and support it.

I like the film. I remember discussing with a certain other punk Buddhist author about a movie they made about him. He told me he wasn’t as psyched as he’d like to have been about that film. He didn’t go so far as to say he disliked it. But I could tell it wasn’t really what he’d hoped it would be.

I didn’t want a movie about me to be disappointing. But I also didn’t want it to be a fluff piece that just made me look like some kind of god-like spiritual super-being either. I told Pirooz that I wanted it to be his vision of me, not my vision of me.

I gave him access to everything I could think of that might be relevant. I gave him a box of photos and videos from my past. I let him come to any talk he wanted to attend and film it. I sat for dozens of interviews. I gave him all the music I’d ever recorded. It was tons of stuff and it must have been a nightmare to slog through all of it. But he did. I gave him contact info for my friends and family and he interviewed everybody that was willing to be interviewed.

He allowed me to view a number of rough cuts. And while I was uncomfortable with some of the material he used, I decided to concern myself only with factual accuracy. So if he used an old film clip that made me cringe but the caption got the date it was recorded wrong I only gave him the correct date. I didn’t ask him to take it out of the movie.

The opening scene is grueling for me to watch. It’s a scene of me at a highly uncomfortable talk in New York City where I had to deal with a couple of people who my talk had upset greatly. I squirm every time I see that. But it’s real and it’s good that it’s in there.

We really tried to get some of the people who used to frequently leave troll-ish comments on my previous blog to be interviewed on camera, but every one of them refused. We tried to get Grace and Peter Schireson to talk about their objections to the things I say, but they turned us down too. I guess they were concerned that we’d make them look bad or something. But that really wasn’t our intention. We wanted to make this an authentic film and having those voices of opposition in there would have helped do that. Ah well. You can’t always get what you want.

In the end, though, this is a highly unusual film. It’s not really what you’d call avant garde. By that I mean that it doesn’t look all that weird. But nonetheless it is deeply, deeply weird. It’s like no other film that’s ever been made about a spiritual teacher. Because it is absolutely and unapologetically honest. It’s also funny. You won’t find Thich Naht Hanh dressing up in a bunny costume. You won’t see the Dalai Lama trying to push the director of a movie about him’s car out of a snow drift. You’re not gonna find two hot girls and a tiny dog sitting in a pink bedroom talking about their friend Ram Dass. You won’t find DEVO and Randy Blythe from Lamb of God in a movie about D.T. Suzuki. It ain’t gonna happen.

47 Responses

Can’t wait to see the film! Reading Hardcore zen when it first came out changed my life for the better. Your teachings helped me to see clearly and as a result make some good decisions in finding a great group to practice Zazen with. I hope this film does what Hardcore zen did for me. Read it on a beach in Cuba and I probably looked at bit silly trying to sit in half lotus posture!

Y’know, at one point I was talking to a guy about turning the cover art of Sit Down & Shut Up into a vinyl figure. I’d still like to do that. But it would’ve been a big investment for me & I wasn’t sure how many of those would sell.

You posted this trailer here….um…how long ago (way too “busy” [not that interested] to look back in the history}?

That uneasy NY group, could that have been Barry Magid and his group who had just lost Joko Beck their teacher like a day before you showed up? Didn’t you wear some unrighteous T-shirt or say something inappropriate? For shame. Bad Brad.

Joko Beck had died about a week or more before my visit. But they held a memorial for her that day. The memorial service happened before I arrived and was finished by the time I got there. I was expressly not invited to the memorial service.

I was in NY working on the film Shoplifting From American Apparel and was wearing a crew t-shirt that had the title of the film on it. I also had a shirt on top of that, so it was partially concealed.

I don’t think I said anything inappropriate. There’s a podcast of the whole talk somewhere. I said things that were challenging.

If the NY Group is the Barry Magid one, then I think its great that its in the movie. Of all the Brad podcasts that I’ve listened to I think this is the best and I’ve listened to it at least 4 times.

I think what happens – and how we react – when we get challenged is one of the best indicators of who we are and how our practice is. I really like the way that Brad gets attacked and how his response is so honest and effective. I think the cconfrontation forces the best out of Brad and he comes across really well and how it forces him to express himself (and what he says) really resonates with me. Barry Magid with his ‘perpetual adolescent’ dig just comes across like a grumpy old man who doesn’t like anyone expressing Zen in a way that doesn’t fit with his own model.

Netflix charges independent movie producers a very high fee to put their movies on the site. Big movies they pay for. Little ones they ask for money for! Like those big movies need the money the way ones like ours do.

Therefore, either HCZ: The Movie has to become so popular that Netflix asks for it or we have to come up with the cash (which we can’t).

You definitely should start a campaign to get this to Netflix! How much do they charge for independent producers for the movie, is it something that the community could achieve? I mean, is it in the range of thousands or tens of thousands or what?

In another note, who do I need to convince to get the film on screen in Finland?

I guess I am the only slightly confused person around here . . . but, I supported the movie through the indie go go site last summer, is this the same thing or is it something different? At any rate, I look forward to receiving the digital download flash drive thingamajig . . . or does all that show up after the film tour?

I am one of the participants of the retreat in Benediktushof in Germany. You told us about this film in one of the talks with you. I watched the trailer, I like the bunny scene and altogether the way you are dealing with the zen teacher stuff. How can we get this film to Germany???

“All things are set on a nonabiding basis. The nonabiding basis is based on nonabiding. If you can reach a thorough realization of this, then all things are One Suchness, and you cannot find even the slightest sign of abiding.

The whole of your present activities and behaviour is nonabiding. Once the basis is clear to you, it will be like having eyes: the sun is shining brightly, and you can see all kinds of colors and forms. Isn’t this the mainspring of transcendent wisdom?

Yongjia said: ‘Without leaving where you are, there is constant clarity.’ No words come closer to the truth than these.”

Kobun Chino Roshi:
“The difficulty wasn’t sitting together; the difficulty was yourself! Wanting to be alone is impossible. When you become really alone you notice you are not alone. In other words, we stop our vigorous efforts towards ideal purity. Purity is just a process. After purity, dry simplicity comes, where almost no more life is there, and your sensation is that you are not existing anymore. Still, you are existing there. You flip into the other side of nothing, where you discover everybody is waiting for you. Before that, you are living together like that—day, sun, moon, stars and food, everything is helping you—but you are all blocked off, a closed system. You just see things from inside toward the outside, and act with incredible, systematic, logical dynamics, and you think everything is alright. When noise, or chaotic situations come, you want to leave that situation to be alone. But there is no such aloneness!

It is very important to experience the complete negation of yourself, which brings you to the other side of nothing. People experience that in many ways. You go to the other side of nothing, and you are held by the hand of the absolute. You see yourself as part of the absolute, so you have no more insistence of self as yourself. You can speak of self as no-self upon the absolute. Only real existence is absolute.”

PLEASE bring this to Columbia, SC. We have a great Buddhist community here with 2 meditation centers including the one I do to, which is a Soto Zen Priory (with Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett on the wall) and the most advanced indie movie house in the Southeast, the NIckelodeon. I can try to rally support, raise funds and make this happen.